Adventures in Breadmaking

Today was the very last day of school - where has the year gone! I hadn't realized how much the girls had grown up this school year until I pulled up the picture I took on the first day of school and compared it to the picture I took this morning.


You might recall that as their end of the year thank you to their teachers they wanted to give them a crocheted dish cloth and a loaf of homemade bread. Last week I ran out of flour and the next bag in the rotation was a 10lb bag ... way more than will ever fit in my counter canister. And so, with no bread in the house, lots and lots of flour on my hands, and a light schedule for the week, I decided to finally try my hand at making bread. Bread making is something I've wanted to learn how to do but have always thought took too long or was too tedious for me to deal with ... and really I guess both are true.



I guess my first real attempt was actually a couple of weeks ago - don't exactly remember why I made it but it was a bit of a disaster ... it tasted okay, but I ended up with two very flat tiny loaves ... I think I exhausted my yeast and my beautifully mounded loaves totally deflated in the hot oven. So with my freshly opened bag of flour I tried this recipe from the Pillsbury cookbook again ... it turned out better this time, but it was still dense and small.

So I turned to my mothers roll recipe which can also be used to make bread ... her Egg Rich Bread. It did yield a larger (higher) loaf and I liked the over all texture and flavor better, but the crust was hard - almost like I'd over baked it.

Last Thursday, Sam and I, used this same recipe of my mom's to make loaves for each of his preschool teachers ... he did the measuring, the stirring, the mixing and the kneading. The loaves turned out beautifully, but again the crust seemed over baked.

Yesterday I took turns with each of the girls and helped them make their loaves for their teachers. They both did a fantastic job, but I realized with them in school, it's been a very long time since I've done any kind of baking with either of them. Cooking, yes, baking, not so much. That's what Sam and I mostly do together. The girls were severely out of practice when it came to little things like cracking eggs and even turning on the mixer. They did catch on very quickly to the process of kneading the bread dough and gained a good appreciation for how much work it takes!



Their dough turned out beautifully and rose perfectly - the best yet! This time I decided to tweak the baking temperature a bit and turn down my oven 15 degrees or so to see if that made a difference in the crust. Each of the girls loaves look beautiful don't they?! Emily's are on the cooling rack, Rebecca's on the counter. I haven't cut into our one extra loaf from this batch yet, but I'm anxious to taste the results of this minor tweaking.





I'm on my second 10lb bag of flour and I'm ready to try a 40/60 whole wheat/white flour bread recipe. I tried one earlier this week that was listed on Mormonchic ... the No Fail Yeast Bread. It makes a lot of bread dough ... a lot of bread dough. So I need to definitely half it for my family (and my mixer). There are a couple of other little quirks about this recipe I need to figure out and perfect ... but it tastes great - light and moist, and makes great cinnamon rolls! So it's definitely one I want to try and make again.